The impossible profession

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Sophie Kemp on why everyone is into psychoanalysis right now.

I am on a date with a man at a bar in Brooklyn where it is red walls, red booths, hardwood floors. I am trying to get drunk but it is not working. I am trying to be convivial but it is not working. Here is a good question to ask when you are in the scenario: what are you reading? The man tells me he is reading this Janet Malcolm book, on psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession,” he says, couching it with facts about the dissolution of his long-term relationship, how he feels better when he goes to the gym. He is like the third or fourth person I know who has read this book in like, the past month. He is like the third or fourth person I know who has alluded to this form of optimization: break up with the psychotherapist, opt for enlightenment by way of something chilly and old school. 

The occurrence keeps repeating itself: On the phone with a friend. A staff picks shelf at the Center for Fiction. At a party in a room with white brick where all the girls wear hunting fatigues even though it is a Saturday night and we are in a converted warehouse in Brooklyn. A bar in my old neighborhood where I keep dipping my index finger in candle wax out of boredom—I am fifteen minutes early again. Inside of my apartment with another man who entered my orbit because he asked me out in an email. The launch party for the magazine Parapraxis where deputy editor Alex Colston wore a slip with Freud’s face on it, as covered in a New York Magazine party report. 

Perhaps you’ve also noticed that people are flocking to psychoanalysis again. That there is something alluring about sitting on a couch in a room with oak paneled walls, talking about your dreams. 

Mindfulness

ICYMI